Items tagged with laptop

Mechanically speaking, Dell has done little to change or update the company's wildly popular XPS 13 and 15 series of premium consumer notebooks since their initial release. There's no mystery as to why that is the case, however. When something works this well, you stick with it. The Dell XPS 13 and XPS 15 have been two of the best selling notebooks in the company's history. That's a bold statement and it stands to reason. The Dell XPS 13 and XPS 15 line of machines, with their unique Infinity Edge displays and gorgeous carbon fiber and aluminum adorned chassis, are some of the best looking, best...Read more...

Dell's Alienware gaming PC division recently announced a refresh of their 13, 15 and 17 notebook product lines, starting with the introduction of their 15 and 17 inch models and more recently unchaining their smaller but just as scrappy 13-inch beast. While the new machines don't usher in Intel's latest Kaby Lake 7th Gen Core series processors (of which only dual-core variants are currently available), they are now packing NVIDIA Pascal firepower, with a GeForce GTX 1080, GeForce GTX 1070 and GeForce GTX 1060 powering the Alienware 17, 15 and 13 models respectively. It was a clean sweep for NVIDIA...Read more...

Update: 11/11/2016 -Our full deep-dive review of the Alienware 13 R3 is now live. Please head here for all the details, benchmarks and analysis.Dell's Alienware division stepped up today with a new, compact and powerful weapon in its laptop arsenal with the announcement of the redesigned Alienware 13 notebook. Now, before you get all misty about the headline, we understand Apple's latest MacBook isn't optimized for gaming, but the comparison of what can be done in a 13-inch notebook frame can still be made. We're just having a little fun with it. Unlike Apple's MacBook Pro and the revamped...Read more...

Asus is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand this year. The manufacturer launched its ROG line in 2006 and has since developed a wide range of gaming products under the brand, including some monstrous gaming notebooks like the one we'll be showing you here. With the arrival of NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture this summer, the hulking systems are getting a shot in the arm, so we brought Asus’ flagship mobile gaming machine, the ROG G752VS XB78K, in house to see what you get when you go big. The efficiency of the Pascal architecture has made for mobile GPUs that are...Read more...

A good rule of thumb when purchasing a gaming laptop is to buy one with the fastest GPU you can afford. Unlike desktop PCs, you usually can't rip out the graphics adapter and upgrade to something faster (not in most cases, anyway), so when that once shiny and fast laptop starts feeling a little sluggish, you're looking at dialing down in-game settings until you've saved enough scratch to buy a new laptop. That's an expensive proposition (it's called throwing the baby out with the bath water), but if gaming on the go is what you're after, you don't have much choice in the matter.That's still the...Read more...

Mainstream notebooks, laptops, and convertible devices have been significantly refined over the last few generations. The $500-$900 price range generally features laptops that are thin and light, built well, have decent battery life, and deliver solid multimedia experiences. Intel has a stranglehold on the CPUs and graphics in many of these mid-level systems, so PC makers seem to be emphasizing design differences lately. As important as performance is, you may well choose your next laptop because it converts into a mode or use case that fits your needs, rather than because of its technical specifications....Read more...

Acer rightfully says there's a new sheriff in town, that being its new Predator 21 X laptop, a mammoth system that's packed to the gills with high-end hardware. This crazy thing even has a curved screen display—it's the first laptop in the world to offer that amenity, which comes by way of a 21-inch panel with a 2,200R curvature and 2560x1080 resolution. If we can fixate on the display for a moment, this looks to be a highlight of a laptop with several bragging points. It uses an In-Plane Switching (IPS) panel, which typically means generous viewing angles and more accurate color reproduction compared...Read more...

CybertronPC is hoping to hit a sweet spot for gamers with its new 14-inch laptop, the CLX Osiris 14. The system is light and slim for a gaming laptop, but it packs an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M and Intel Skylake quad-core CPU under its hood, so this machine is clearly not messing around. The Osiris 14 is a member of CybertronPC’s CLX family, which is so decidedly different than CybertronPC’s other product offerings, that the line has its own website. If you visit CybertronPC.com, you’ll need to choose the CLX site to find the Osiris 14. It’s not unusual for PC makers to create or buy distinct...Read more...

The race to build the world's thinnest laptop hasn't always resulted in quality design innovation or utility over more full-figured machines. For example, comparatively, Apple's MacBook Air line looks a little plain-Jane versus some of the nicer thin and light laptops on the market these days, and certainly HP's Spectre line as well. HP recently saw fit to fully revamp its Spectre series across multiple sizes and formats, the latest of which is simply branded Spectre. The HP Spectre is actually a 13-inch machine, so you might refer to it as such (Spectre 13), if it helps you make the distinction....Read more...

If you're in the market for a gaming laptop, you might be holding out for the first batch of notebooks to include a graphics chip based on NVIDIA's potent new Pascal architecture. The good news is you don't have long to wait—an ASUS ROG laptop has been spotted wielding a GeForce GTX 1070, along with several other high-end goodies. It's the ASUS ROG G752VS, a 17.3-inch beast that will be available in a few different configurations, all of them sporting the GeForce GTX 1070 GPU. Notice there's no "M" to designate that it's a mobile GPU, an interesting omission that has us wondering how close to the...Read more...

There's a first time for everything, as the saying goes, and the Alienware 13 OLED is a first for us without question. Though there were a couple of OLED (Organic LED) display driven laptops at CES 2016 this year, Dell's Alienware division is the first in the door here at HotHardware with a retail ready product. OLED displays offer better brightness, contrast, saturation and pixel response times versus legacy display types like IPS, and in in general they're more power efficient as well. OLED displays are somewhat common these days in smartphones and as it turns out, OLED-enabled handsets...Read more...

ASUS ROG (Republic of Gamers) is working on a new laptop for gamers that's going to be big, both in size and performance. The company's R&D isn't quite ready to let the cat out of the bag, but it did share some tidbits that give you an idea of what to expect from what ASUS ROG considers "the future of ultimate gaming laptops." One of those tidbits sits inconspicuously in the tags section of ASUS ROG's blog post. We say it's inconspicuous because tags are generally intended for search engines like Google and Bing to index a website. But in this instance, one of the tags reveals that ASUS ROG...Read more...

At a time when laptop makers are shunning big and bulky notebooks in favor of thin and light designs, Lenovo went a different direction with its ThinkPad P70, a mobile workstation brimming with high-end hardware for tackling rough and tumble tasks in the field. It's all about finding the right tool for the job, and just as a lumberjack wouldn't trade his gas-powered chainsaw for a Swiss Army knife just because he could fit in his pocket, there are certain computing tasks that require desktop-class performance. That's what the ThinkPad P70 aims to deliver. The ThinkPad P70 is one of the first mobile...Read more...

With the release of Windows 8, Microsoft effectively encouraged its hardware partners to think beyond the confines of traditional PC design, giving them the nudge they needed to introduce bold new products. Lenovo embraced the challenge, and in 2012 it brought its first Yoga system to market, a multi-mode laptop that could fold back onto itself like a carnival contortionist. The design proved popular, so over the past few years Lenovo has added new laptops to its Yoga line. One of the newest is the Yoga 700, a 14-inch convertible that takes advantage of the latest technologies, pairing Intel's...Read more...